One point not covered by the article is how reading real world code will also help set realistic expectations, especially if you are a relative newbie. The truth is that there is a lot of code in the world, even in popular frameworks and libraries, which does its job but which does so in clunky or unreadable ways. I don't blame this on the developers, on the contrary it's my experience that any codebase will develop a number of FIXMEs and TODOs over time because the initial design very rarely matches the final design and because there is not a business case for making everything shine. Perfect code is a noble goal but prohibitively expensive to implement.

This is a nice lesson for a novice programmer to let sink in. That software is written by humans. Mostly clever people but not infallible. And subject to all kinds of tradeoffs. They call it computer science at university, but most of the time we are craftsmen working on buildings evolving as we go.

I recall my personal eureka moment in this regard. 2001, final year of university, writing Java code for my thesis. Downloaded the source code for the official Java APIs, I think it was, to better understand how they worked. I was genuinely surprised by the amount of critical comments and "fix this" comments strewn throughout the code. It was a great learning experience and took the pressure off my shoulders to be "perfect".